The internet was supposed to make the world smaller, remember? Sure, to an extent, that’s certainly happened. For instance, I’ve got Facebook “friends” in various time zones across multiple continents. That’s one of the modern miracles of social networking.
But I’ve been realizing lately that one thing the social web also does is reinforce local navel-gazing, mainly because the social web is increasingly so “real-time” focused-and time zones are, obviously, the enemy of real-time. When North American tweet volume skyrockets during prime-time TV viewing hours, we Americans can’t help but underscore our disconnection from the rest of the world (particularly when we’re all collectively enthusing about shows that don’t air at all, or air at odd hours, overseas). When Britain tweets en masse about Konnie Huq (per the BBC: “TV host Konnie Huq and Screenwipe presenter Charlie Brooker are engaged to be married, her spokeswoman has confirmed”), well, um, congratulations, Konnie? In the real-time social world, we’re literally often sleeping while Asia’s interests are trending, and vice versa. (Besides, Indonesia has its celebrity sex tapes, and we have ours.)
And ultimately, the current, weeks-long social-media explosion surrounding the World Cup only underscores how few events truly unite the world-with most Americans still not caring about soccer, of course-across national boundaries and time zones. (It also underscores, once again, how silly it is that we Americans call our baseball championship the World Series!) Then again, if you take a close look at the atomized, team- and player-specific way in which people tweet about the World Cup, the local-obsession rule still holds. It’s just that the World Cup gives a temporary worldwide stage to over-the-top sporty nationalism (just like the Olympics).
Meanwhile, the rise of social check-in services like Foursquare are all about the hyper-local. The web may have given us the capacity to be globally omniscient, but the social and real-time web are reinforcing the basic instinct for extreme parochialism: caring only about what’s in your backyard, or what’s showing on your TV, or what’s happening at your nearby favorite watering hole right now.
How utterly human: As a species, we get it together to build a mind-bogglingly complex network that weaves together millions of computers into a massive, throbbing, bleeping blooping global nervous system, and what do we use it for? To tell our nearby friends that we have arrived at O’Neill’s pub, one block away.
That said, next time I’m at O’Neill’s and I notice that Twitter is down? When it goes back up, I’m definitely tweeting “Baleia Maldita.”
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